We were listening to a podcast about creativity in the feed, and we realized there is something VERY new happening in advertising. Because most advertising now takes place in the news feed, there are new opportunities and challenges for brands.

There is no such thing any longer as an ad campaign based only on traditional ad “units.” Instead the future will consist more and more of branded emojis, stickers and chatbots communicating with the consumer in entirely new ways that are more contextually relevant. Those “ad units” of the future are in messaging apps, which go well beyond just the feed.

For creatives, the fact that larger ad units have disappeared, creates a narrow but potentially very appealing possibility. But first the advertising industry has to get rid of the “muscle memory” it developed back in the day when two thirds of what people consumed was controllable by the media industry. Now, a switch has been flipped and only a third of what people consume is controllable, because there’s so much consumer preference and so much user-generated content organic.

We used to try to change consumer behavior with communications platforms. Now, instead, we have to change brand behavior. We used to be able to invade consumer spaces with repurposed TV ads, but consumers have told us in no uncertain terms that they don’t want to be invaded, though they may still be willing to get engaged.

Advertising needs to be invited into people’s feeds. Consumers are far more judicious in what they want to see in their feeds, and they only want to see a brand that is accretive to their lives in some way — perhaps learning or educational, a utility, commerce, or entertainment. If it doesn’t fall into those buckets, people are not interested.

The brands that are going to be invited into the feed are going to be minimal if we follow those dicta, so brands will also have to figure out how to “crash” the feed. And here Rob Norman, the host of Tagline, had something very telling to say: if you are going to crash someone’s feed you have to be like the crasher at a party — the guy who wasn’t invited but gets very drunk and is allowed to stay because he’s very funny, rather than the guy who crashes the party and ruins it.

Thus brands and agencies have to think about how to be valuable. Facebook, Google and the other large platforms feel like the key to this puzzle is relevance, which is determined by artificial intelligence in programmatic buys that take place in trillionths of seconds. In that context, how does a creative agency determine what message will get the most relevant ads surfaced most frequently?

This is where chatbots come in. For example, in a successful recent NFL campaign for Bud Light, a bot asked two simple questions in a messaging app, “where do you live” and “what’s your team,” and then disappeared until two hours before game time, when an ad in the feed appeared for BudLight along with a link to a beer delivery service. That’s probably the best contextual use of bots and ads we’ve seen in a while.

We’d welcome your ideas for other creative ways to make consumers more comfortable with ads in the feed. Put your comments here, or on the Twitter.